My iPad was very precious to me, but now it spontaneously shuts down every minute. I will eventually buy a new one 😀. Perhaps we’re speaking of items that are of sentimental value and that are impossible to replace. They’re quite a lot of these in my house. I think the oldest item is a ventriloquist dummy that I got back in 1972, when I was nine.
I wanted to get him for Christmas 1971, but he was out of our price range. So, I got something else instead. Then, early in the new year, out of the blue, my mother gave me the money to get him.
Later that year, I started getting into pop music, and I was slightly embarrassed about my ventriloquist skills. But I won a local talent contest and performed in a few local events, even up to 1977.
I actually still have him in the attic. In Ireland, he was called Finnegan, which is the name of a dummy that O’Brien (Eugene Lambert) from Wanderly Wagon used. But recently I discovered that he had different names in different countries.
He’s known as Mr. Parlanchin elsewhere. I’ve even seen him in a few old 1970s pop videos. So what other possessions are precious to me? I still have some LP records from my teens. I got my first Beatles album, the Red Album, in 1974, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon around 1976 and Bob Dylan’s Saved in June 1980, just a couple of months before I committed my life to Christ.
Note: By committing my life to Christ, I mean thinking it all through and repenting and trusting in Christ in my own right rather than relying on the fact that I was brought up as a nominal Christian. At 18, I personally committed my life to Christ and started attending evangelical churches, to be with others who had made the same commitment and wanted to learn all about New Testament Christianity. See my Isn’t Everyone a Christian post.
I parted with most of my old LPs, so the few remaining feel more precious to me. I do have some others, but I think of the 1970s as mainly discovering the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Punk/New Wave and finally, Bob Dylan in 1980. I got rid of all my punk albums when I became a Christian. I saw them as a bad influence, but maybe I would have grown out of it anyway within a couple of years.
I still have a couple of diaries I kept in 1979 and 1980. I’d be sorry to part with these. I do like to read them from time to time. They mainly consist of brief accounts of what happened from day to day rather than deep musings, but it is intriguing to go back in time. And I have held on to some of the toys that my children had in their early years.
However, ultimately, what I am thankful for is all the memories associated with these items, and many other items that I’ve parted with. So even if I eventually lose the items, I still have the memories. And over the last few years, I’ve taken special care to record my memories. My goal is to create PowerPoint presentations of every year of my life, with each slide representing a month. As well as personal memories, I add songs, films, news events and pictures. I’m making sure to keep plenty of copies. These have now become a precious possession.
I always like to point to a few hymns in my posts. Here are a few songs with Christian themes that made the UK or Irish charts in 1972, the year of Finnegan 😀. I confess that I was more interested in the likes of Whiskey in the Jar by Thin Lizzy, but I was familiar with these at the time.
Hibernia Gospel 